Christopher Burgess’s presentation at SMC Seattle’s June event wasn’t just a wake-up call. It was a grab-and-shake-you-silly, ring-all-the-alarm-bells, freak-you-out-in-a-good-way kind of wake-up call.

The Senior Security Officer at Cisco Systems shared his cautionary tales and pointed advice about social media and internet security to a sold-out crowd at 415Westlake as they listened, tweeted, and raised their hands in response to his engaging questions throughout the night.

Among his questions:

After he highlighted the tremendous growth of social media via some striking statistics (e.g., “91% of all consumer internet traffic will be video in 2013″), Burgess stressed that our increasingly interconnected world demands a smart, common sense approach from each of us.

We own our words, which means we must also be aware of the permanent imprint they make.

“Once it is on the net, it is there forever,” Burgess cautioned. “There are no do-overs.”

As individuals and company representatives, we need to implement strategies and structures around our social media efforts, or be open to the troubling consequences that could follow, which include: identity theft, intellectual property violations, stalking, and physical harm.

Proving that he that he is walking the talk, Burgess provided the crowd with a link to Cisco’s social media handbook. These dangers are not just urban legends, said Burgess, as he recalled the story of a man who, after tweeting about his upcoming 10-day cruise, came back to an empty house.

Whenever you broadcast anything online, you should “talk about where you’ve been, not where you’re going.”

As for other “tweetable moments”, Burgess offered the following nuggets, ranging from fascinating to frightening to funny:

From my back row view, Burgess’s presentation felt like an impassioned and animated plea to think more seriously about our own online privacy and safety, and then act on it. Today.

Which reminds me… I’d better go do some password-smithing.

p.s. Let’s keep the conversation rolling! What questions did Christopher Burgess leave you with? Add a comment below or on Twitter: @burgessct & @SMCSeattle

p.p.s. Congratulations to Shauna Causey, SMC Seattle’s new VP!

Thank you to our sponsors: CBS Radio and Tungle.me!

CBS Radio, Seattle (comprised by KZOK.FM, KMPS.FM, JACK.FM, and AM1090) recognizes and embraces the digital evolution of our media.  Locally and nationally, their network employs a progressive perspective on multi-media stratagems and 360 solutions.  Social media rests at the epicenter of our digital focus.  Listeners are encouraged to blog, tweet, and facebook with his/her favorite on-air personalities, upload audio/visual content, share music, and much more. Follow them on Twitter: @1025KZOK and @941KMPS

Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones.  Tungle.me is a free personal scheduling application that eliminates costly double bookings, time zone mishaps, and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.  Tungle.me synchronizes with leading online calendar systems and does not require registration. Follow them on Twitter: @TungleRocks

Christopher Burgess, Senior Security Advisor

Christopher Burgess has been studying security and its role in social media as part of his job as Senior Security Advisor to Cisco.  He says he became interested in the topic when he saw how criminals were using the online environment to their advantage.

“If businesses and individuals understand how their information may be used by an individual with malevolent intent, they can appropriately adjust,“ says Burgess.  ”I help with the understanding. It is one of the reasons I volunteered for, and am a member of the Washington State Attorney General’s Internet Safety Taskforce.

Burgess will be speaking on how businesses and teams can create policies that minimize risk to their company while making sure they are asking the right questions of their IT team. He will offer tips, best practices and case studies.  If you are a business owner, marketer, PR consultant, or brand manager, you won’t want to miss this presentation. We are anticipating another sold-out event, so be sure to register soon!

Before his talk we caught up with Burgess to ask him a few questions.

What are the biggest security threats posed by social media to businesses?

I’ll share two which are top of my mind for me at this time, but do understand, as we move forward on the timeline and new methodologies evolve so do new threats.

1. Not having a social media handbook or guide which educates your employees on how social media is to be used in support of the business internally and externally
2. Data migration to uncontrolled environments

You mention that writing a company social media handbook is a good thing to do but many company handbooks regarding social media seem to crack down on employee use and completely ignore the possible benefits of having your employees talk about your company. How do you strike a balance?

Hopefully there are far fewer iterations of a policy or handbook which lockdown their employees, and more which are created to guide their employees in the use of social media tools both internal and external to the company. Without such the business leaves to interpretation as to how to triage situations and define what and how the company prefers the tools to be used. I think most of us prefer to remove ambiguity and provide our employees with direction and resources to make good decisions.

When did you first realize that company security was at risk because of employee use of social media?

A great question. Risk is a broadly defined word which can be quantified and defined in a variety of ways.

So let me give you two examples and I’ll hit on these and a few more during the presentation.

The first I’ll take right out chapter one of my book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost.” The “The Tale of the Targeted Trojan” discusses a case which demonstrated how the confluence of physical and technical surveillance conducted by those with criminal intent allowed for the creation of a one-off piece of malware which was specifically designed to extract competitive data from an unsuspecting business and did so across a number of international borders. The surveillance included the mining and observation of the information the unsuspecting business and their employees had placed online and thus was available for harvest. A number of companies were successfully targeted and lost a host of information. The different types of information included intellectual property, go to market plans, customer data, personnel data, etc.

The second has to do with taking internal data and exposing it externally. Specifically, I witnessed, from afar, a company in the healthcare industry take their internal coordination of their patient records and services and organically migrate the coordination to a convenient external environment which gave them connectivity in such a way that their internal infrastructure did not. Unfortunately, the external environment wasn’t designed with the level of security required by regulatory directive.

What different security issues do small companies face compared to large ones?

Small companies by definition have more limited resources than larger ones and thus don’t readily have the infrastructure or head-count to throw at the issue, but other than the resource difference, the issues are identical. They still have their data, their customer data, their intellectual property and trade secrets and their brand to protect, the differences is scale.

Are there technical security issues business owners and managers should be discussing with their IT team?

Absolutely. Both large and small companies should be discussing how a given technological implementation meets the business needs, while also conforming with the company’s information security policies and regulatory guidelines. Lets return to my prior example of the company which had an organic migration to a third-party environment for the purposes of doing their job in a more collaborative and coordinated manner. It would appear the intent was noble, but it also appears that the security and privacy regime surrounding that environment were not fully understood. It is this understanding that I believe are amongst the most important to be discussing with those providing IT.

Why should people come see you speak? — Why is your talk so important?

Those who are able to attend should take away a perspective and context which they may not have given much thought too previously. There is no turning back time nor the tide, the evolution of social media is continuing, and we are all participants, keeping our businesses, ourselves and our families safe and secure is what this talk is about – that’s important.

Any last thoughts?

I do enjoy sharing information and am very much looking forward to the event on the 29th of June when I will be amongst my friends, family, and colleagues within the Social Media Club of Seattle, a club which I am a member. I hope this is just the beginning of this conversation.

See Christopher Burgess at our June Event:

Date – June 29, 2010
Time – 6-9 p.m.
Tickets – $15 includes two drinks and appetizers
Location – 415 Westlake – 415 Westlake Ave. N. Seattle, Washington  98109
Register Now - http://smcseajune.eventbrite.com/

(Complimentary on-site parking available)

Thank you to sponsors CBS Radio Seattle and Tungle.me

More About Christopher Burgess:

Christopher Burgess is a senior security advisor to the chief security officer of Cisco, where he focuses on intellectual property strategies. Additionally, Christopher leads the Global Investigative Support team, the Government Security Office, and the Global Threat Analysis team. Burgess co-authored the book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, Preventing Intellectual Property Theft and Economic Espionage in the 21st Century” (Syngress, March 2008). In December 2009, The Huffington Post published his piece “A Common Sense Approach to Social Media.” Follow Christopher Burgess on Twitter: @burgessct and Cisco: http://twitter.com/CiscoSystems

Join us on June 29 as speaker Christopher Burgess offers his preferred practices and cautionary tales from his role as senior security advisor at Cisco.

When done right, says Burgess, social media allows you to engage in dynamic conversations with users, build brand equity, improve your solutions, and drive customers to purchase and adopt. But beware of the dark side, as employee behavior can cast a poor light on your company and put the integrity of your brand’s reputation, network, and IP at risk.

If you are a business owner, marketer, PR consultant, or brand manager, you won’t want to miss this presentation. We are anticipating another sold-out event, so be sure to register soon!

June event details:

Date – June 29, 2010
Time – 6-9 p.m.
Tickets – $15 includes two drinks and appetizers
Location – 415 Westlake – 415 Westlake Ave. N. Seattle, Washington  98109
Register Now – http://smcseajune.eventbrite.com/

(Complimentary on-site parking available)

About our speaker:

Christopher Burgess is a senior security advisor to the chief security officer of Cisco, where he focuses on intellectual property strategies. Additionally, Christopher leads the Global Investigative Support team, the Government Security Office, and the Global Threat Analysis team. Burgess co-authored the book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, Preventing Intellectual Property Theft and Economic Espionage in the 21st Century” (Syngress, March 2008). In December 2009, The Huffington Post published his piece “A Common Sense Approach to Social Media.” Follow Christopher Burgess on Twitter: @burgessct and Cisco: http://twitter.com/CiscoSystems

Thank you to our sponsors: CBS Radio and Tungle.me!

CBS Radio, Seattle (comprised by KZOK.FM, KMPS.FM, JACK.FM, and AM1090) recognizes and embraces the digital evolution of our media.  Locally and nationally, their network employs a progressive perspective on multi-media stratagems and 360 solutions.  Social media rests at the epicenter of our digital focus.  Listeners are encouraged to blog, tweet, and facebook with his/her favorite on-air personalities, upload audio/visual content, share music, and much more. Follow them on Twitter: @1025KZOK and @941KMPS

Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones.  Tungle.me is a free personal scheduling application that eliminates costly double bookings, time zone mishaps, and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.  Tungle.me synchronizes with leading online calendar systems and does not require registration. Follow them on Twitter: @TungleRocks

Social content that your search engine cannot find is such a big lost opportunity.

As we get more active in Social Media, we all need to understand how to leverage that into online marketing for ourselves and our businesses.

SMCSeattle Ed (read more about our SMCSea Ed Series here ), is bringing some wonderfully smart and respected individuals from the field of Internet marketing, so you can learn all about  integrating Internet Marketing tactics along with the Social Media efforts for you and your business. Come and learn, ask tough questions and engage with some of the brightest minds and speakers in the field of Internet Marketing.

Jenny Dibble from SearchMarketMe, Lurie from Conversation Marketing and Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz  will lead the discussion .

Details of the event are at – http://smcseaedapr2010.eventbrite.com/

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jenny Dibble

Jenny Dibble is the owner of SearchMarketMe, a national online marketing training, software and support organization based out of Issaquah WA. Since 2007, she has helped hundreds of small businesses leverage the internet to reach customers in creative and economical ways and conducts training regularly on all aspects of online marketing. She (happily) currently doesn’t have free time for much of anything since the birth of her two-month-old son, Owen.

Ian Lurie

Ian Lurie is Chief Marketing Curmudgeon and President at Portent Interactive, a firm he started in 1995.Portent is a full-service internet marketing company whose services include SEO, SEM and strategic consulting.
In his spare time he rants and writes at www.conversationmarketing.com.
Ian recently co-published the Web Marketing for Dummies All In One Desk Reference. In it, he wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He’s the author of Conversation Marketing, the blog (at www.conversationmarketing.com) and the book by the same name.

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz, a leader in the field of search engine optimization tools, resources & community. In 2009, he co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media and was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek. Rand has been written about it in The Seattle Times, Newsweek and the NY Times among others and keynoted conferences on search around the world. He’s particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. In his miniscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, Geraldine.

A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO THE FOLLOWING SUPPORTERS

Sean DeButts – for hosting the event at BloodCenter

Sean DeButts is the Social Media Coordinator for Puget Sound Blood Center. While working at the Blood Center’s scheduling center, he spent five months writing the plan for the Social Media Program in between calls. The program enables blood donors to use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube to organize blood drives, schedule donations and educate friends about the need for blood. Sean has volunteered for Gnomedex 9.0, has spoken about social media at the University of Washington and has been interviewed for TechFlash.com and SeattlePI.com.

Joanna Lord – for prompt communication and support from the SEOMoz side

Joanna Lord is Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement at SEOmoz.org, where she introduces new online audiences to SEOmoz’s continuously evolving suite of SEO tools. Prior to SEOmoz, she was an online marketing consultant for small and medium-size businesses in LA & Seattle. She also co-founded her own site, YourJobStop, a meta-engine for job seekers trying to utilize the power of social media when seeking out employment online. She is a regular speaker on a variety of topics, some of which include; paid search marketing, social media marketing, competitive research, and content development.

Good luck on the million bucks part, but guess what: Twestival Seattle has the rest covered!

On Thursday, March 25th thousands of people in cities around the globe will gather face-to-face to use social media for social good at Twestival! All Twestival gatherings are volunteer-driven, and 100 percent of the event proceeds go directly to Concern Worldwide, an inspiring international humanitarian organization that works to make education more accessible for some of the world’s poorest children. For more information on the history and impact of Twestival, visit: http://twestival.com/

So, what about the flying part? We’re lucky enough to have Emerald City Trapeze in our ‘hood, and they’ve generously offered their space to be the official venue of Twestival! And, thanks to Spring Creek Group for sponsoring the “air time,” a few lucky attendees will get the opportunity to ‘fly high’ learning trapeze basics. There are 60 flying spots available and if you’re interested, please email ShaunaCausey-at-gmail-dot-com. If you’re one of the first 50 to respond, you’ll get a chance to take one or two swings, under the guidance of the talented Emerald City Trapeze instructors,of course. If you’re not interested in trying it out for yourself, don’t worry, there will be a professional flying show later in the evening so we can watch the best in the Northwest perform. Most creative Twestival venue ever? We think so! Follow @TwestivalSea for more unfolding updates.

Twestival Seattle Details
Date – Thursday, March 25
Location – Emerald City Trapeze (2702 6th Avenue South in SODO.)
Time – 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Donation Levels –

$30 early bird / $40 regular registration (up to 1 week prior to the event)
$50 bronze donor
$75 silver donor
$100 gold/corporate donor

RSVP here! http://bit.ly/twseattle

About Concern Worldwide (@Concern): Concern Worldwide was founded in 1968 to meet the needs of people living in extreme poverty. Concern is a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of poverty. Please follow @concern on Twitter to get a glimpse of their staff tweeting from around the world; including their efforts on the ground in Haiti.

A huge thanks to Swedish Medical Center (@Swedish) for being the PLATINUM Sponsor! Did you know Swedish is turning 100 this year? The original Swedish Hospital opened as a nonprofit in 1910 by Swedish immigrant and surgeon Dr. Nils Johanson. Today, Swedish is Greater Seattle’s largest nonprofit health system. They’re working to improve the health of the community in many ways, including using social media to raise awareness about health issues. Swedish Medical Center not only shares the same acronym as Social Media Club Seattle (we both go by SMC), they are also a big supporter of SMC Seattle and Twestival Seattle. Learn about contests and other fun surprises in store for their 100th birthday by following Swedish online:
@Swedish
Facebook.com/swedishbabies
Youtube.com/swedishseattle
Facebook.com/swedishmedicalcenter

Every one of you has played a big part in making 2009 a great year for SMC Seattle, and we want to see all of you at our anniversary event! So, we are happy to announce that, with the approval of Spitfire Grill to fill the entire place, we will now be selling tickets at the door for our January event. (150 of them!)

This also gives us a great opportunity to raise even more money for the Jolkona project with Technology Access Foundation.

Here are the details -

What: SMC’s One-Year Anniversary Celebration

Where: Spitfire Grill, downtown Seattle 2219 4th Avenue  Seattle, WA 98121

Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Time: 6-9 p.m.

Cost:
$10 tickets includes 2 drinks and apps http://smcseattlejan.eventbrite.com/ – SOLD OUT!
$5 minimum donation tickets to be sold at the door (cash/check only – drinks and food not included)

100% of the ticket sales will go to fund one year of specialized science, technology, engineering, and math training for kids (through a Jolkona project with Technology Access Foundation).

For more information on the event, please see the original announcement here – http://smcseattle.com/jan2010/

Thanks to our sponsors, Seattle.SocialCentral.Net, Spitfire and Gist!

About Jolkona’s TAF Project and Technology Access Foundation:

Jolkona Foundation believes that small amounts of money can change the world. As a 501(c)3 organization, Jolkona addresses problems across the world by connecting people to innovative non-profits and showing one-to-one proof of where the donation money goes. SMC Seattle is supporting them through funding their TAF project.

TAF is a Seattle-area non-profit that prepares underserved children of color for success by providing a rigorous and relevant K-12 curriculum. Founded in Seattle in 1996, TAF provides opportunities for urban youth of color to gain necessary skills and education to successfully compete for professional careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).

Many of you have asked for access to Veronica’s slides and she has graciously allowed us to post them here.

A big thanks to Windows Phone for being the premier sponsor of this month’s event!
Follow Windows Phone on Twitter
Follow Windows Phone on Facebook
Follow Windows Phone on YouTube

Thanks also to Alaska Air for being our travel sponsor!
Follow Alaska Air on Twitter

Next month will be SMC Seattle’s one year anniversary! Although a date has not yet been set, it’s sure to be a good time and another sold-out event.

We’ll post the details here, but to get notified first sign-up for our email alerts.

Location:  Desert Fire /  7211 166th Avenue Northeast / Redmond, WA 98052-7815 / 425-895-1500

Time: 8:30pm–11pm  (21+ please)

What: Network with SMC Seattle board members and event attendees. Food and drinks are hosted by Sprint.

Sprint 4G: There will also be live 4G demos and giveaways from Sprint. The Sprint team will be on-hand to discuss Sprint’s new-to-Seattle 4G network including live demos of all of the cool wireless, device, gaming, laptop and video applications 4G enables!

Everyone who attends SMC Seattle’s after-party will be entered to win one of numerous Sprint 3G/4G combo data cards. For those who attended the SMC Seattle event earlier in the evening, we’ll be drawing for a Sprint mystery prize. (It’s not a phone, and you will not receive it until it’s launched in 2010. The winner will not be disappointed!)

Those without a ticket to attend SMC Seattle’s 12/8 event are encouraged to attend the after-party, come early and bring your laptop to watch SMC Seattle’s livestream.

Have a question about building community for Veronica? Please post it in the comments. We will try to ask as many of your questions as possible at the event!

You Can Find Veronica . .
veronicabelmont.com
twitter.com/veronica
www.facebook.com/Veronica-Belmont

December Meetup Event Details:

Date – Tuesday, December 8th
Time – 6:00-9:00pm
Location – Microsoft Conference Center: 16070 N.E. 36th Way, Redmond, WA 98052
Tickets – Sold out!

For all of you that requested the video of Sean’s popular presentation here it is!
If you just want the slides you can find them here.